A Study On Students' English Vocabulary Knowledge

According to Nation and Laufer, vocabulary knowledge can be divided into three types: passive, controlled active and free active vocahulaxy. This thesis is to investigate the relationships axnon.g these three types of English vocabulary knowledge possessed by the students in two different groups: the non-language majors and the Japanese majors so as to discover some features of the vocabulaty knowledge possessed by the Chinese English learners, The main experiment instruments adopted in. this study are the Vocahulaiy Levels Test (Nation 1983. 1990), the productive version of the Levels Test (Laufer&Nation), and the Lexical Frequency Profile (Laufer&Nation, 1995). After the three tests are carried out, the results are analyzed by SPSS software. The experiment intends to irove the following hypotheses put forward by the author: 1) Passive vocabularies of both groups arc larger than their respective controlled active vocabularies. 2) Non-language majors have more passive ~.cahulary (P) and less controlled active vocabulaiy (CA) than the Japanese majors do. 3) The CA/P ratio is higher in the Japanese majors. 4) Japanese majors have more free active vocabulary than the non- language majors do. 5) Those who have more P may have more CA and FA vocabularies, and vice versa. The results of the experitnent have proved most of the above mentioned hypotheses. By analyses and discussion, the author abstracts the several factors affecting th~.m growth of vocabulary and makes some suggestions for our present English vocabulary teaching and learning.